Jasmine Nights

Justin Gaysorn Leonowens lives in a large house in the old Bangkok residential quarter, raised by three great-aunts who conduct their lives according to the classical Thai court traditions their family has maintained for generations. Outside the compound walls, 1960s Bangkok is changing fast — American military bases have brought rock and roll, television, and a new English-speaking social world into contact with the city's older rhythms. Somtow, who grew up in Bangkok himself, captures the specific adolescent experience of belonging to two cultures simultaneously, in the decade before Thailand's political transformations made that negotiation unavoidable.